Still, it must be admitted that, impossible as was the task of making the Infinite and Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, Milton's very failure in it is sublime. His prodigious powers are nowhere more wonderfully displayed than in trying to do what no one, not even himself, could do. The second half of his third book, for instance, is far more interesting than the first, but it may well be doubted whether the mere fact of his accomplishing the first at all is not a greater proof of his poetic genius. Nowhere does that unfailing certainty of style, in which he has scarcely an equal among the poets of the whole world, stand him in such astonishing stead as in these difficult dialogues in heaven.

"Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find grace; And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of thy winged messengers. To visit all thy creatures, and to all Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought? Happy for Man, so coming;"

On the side of invention there is nothing remarkable; but, on the side of art, what a {159} divine graciousness there is in its tone and manner; what incomparable skill in the management of the verse! Note the quiet monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, of the decree of mercy, and then the expansion of it, the loving voice pressing forward in freer movement as it confidently proclaims the happy results that cannot fail to follow. And observe the peculiarly Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to word: the "grace" of the first line giving the key to the "grace" of the second, the repeated "find" of the second line and the repeated "all" of the fourth, the "comes" of the fifth line leading on to the "coming" of the sixth. To make a list of such details as these is not to explain the effect which they produce; that is the secret of Milton's genius. So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of the verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line—

"The speediest of thy winged messengers."

{160} Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, in which the Bible had anticipated him a hundred times, admitted of no novelty in itself; and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these high matters. But what he could do he did. The matter of the speech he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard before: but after this manner he has not heard it. In passing through Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.

Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as actors in his drama. But the escape could only be partial. It is true that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a verbose and argumentative Deity. Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all, cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree. "Let thy words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him. Milton's God suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.

Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in part unperceived, inherent in the subject of Paradise Lost. One more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry is a human art and its subject is human life. In the story Milton set himself to tell there are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends, without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves? The answer is twofold. It is partly that they do fail to provide that material. The Paradise Lost has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less variety of action, than the Iliad and Odyssey. This was probably unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention. It was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary people in everyday life. The line which he most often repeats in Paradise Lost is the very opposite of those which are repeated so often in the Iliad, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs together: such as—

hos oi men toiauta pros allelous agoreuon

What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his stateliest lines, the magnificent—

"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."

The choice is characteristic of the man. His "natural port," as Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures." So it may well be that this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it would have done with most poets. But he was not altogether blind to it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now. His action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not increase the number of actors. Yet into the mouths of this tiny group of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own experience. This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any poet. By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall. So, after the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm—

"Thus they their doubtful consultations dark Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief; {164} As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower, If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet, Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."

Note how large and general it is. Its method is the classical appeal to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth. Matthew Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of the greatness of the ancient poets. This is the truth: and not only for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress—the "sure and flawless perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind, for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.

Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him. So in the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the Roman and Laudian clergy. Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise: and the simile begins—

"As when a prowling wolf, Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve In hurdled cotes amid the field secure, Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold: Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors, Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault, In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles: So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold: So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb."

The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection, present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application here: how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate—

"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!"

It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness of action. But that is notably not the case here. And in the main it seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful, ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence, which all men find fitting at great moments. So Shakspeare makes Kent say at Lear's death—

"Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer."

And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise—

{167}

"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold."

So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual eating of the fatal apple—

"she plucked, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe, That all was lost."

So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of

"which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world:"

So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in hell:

"And that must end us; that must be our cure— To be no more:"

So again he closes the first Act of Paradise Regained with a verse of solitary awe—

"And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."

{168}

But to return to the similes. Milton uses them, as we have seen, to introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic theme of his poem. But he also uses them to introduce the whole world into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive order. So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army of rebel angels far exceeds those

"That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore, When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarabbia."

So, in another of his returns to those tales and fancies of the Middle Age which, in spite {169} of his intellectual and moral rejection of their falsity, yet always moved him to unusual beauty of verse, he compares the dwarfed rebels of Hell to the

"faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds."

So Eve at her gardening recalls Pales, or Pomona or

"Ceres in her prime, Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove."

And so, in an earlier book, the beauty of Paradise itself, too great to be directly told, is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, conveyed to us by the most perfect of those negative similes which, forced upon Milton by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps the most distinctive of all the glories of Paradise Lost. It is too long to quote in full: but a few lines may be given: and they must include the first four, one of which has just {170} been quoted, verses of such amazing beauty that, if Milton could be represented by four lines, these might well be the chosen four—

"Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers. Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired Castalian spring, might with this Paradise Of Eden strive."

But it is time to leave Milton's similes, though similes play a more important part in Paradise Lost than in any other epic. Indeed their necessary absence is a great element in the comparative dulness of the books given over to the discourses of Raphael and Michael. A single chapter in a little book of this kind can only deal with one or two aspects of so great a subject as Paradise Lost. That being so, it is best, perhaps, to touch on points in which Milton stands pre-eminent or unique. The similes are one of these. Another is the splendour of the Miltonic speeches. It is one of the defects of Paradise Lost that its actors are seldom soldiers whom all the ages agree to admire, and often theologians whom all fear or dislike, or politicians whom all obey {171} and despise. Yet how magnificently Milton turns this weakness into a strength! His speeches have not the eternal humanity of Homer's: but as oratory, above all as debating oratory, they have no poetic rivals outside the drama. The poet who had lived through the Long Parliament and the trial of Strafford knew the art of speech as Homer could not know it. It may seem strange to us that the political struggle of his day affected him so much more than the military; but the fact is so. Pym and Hampden are felt in Paradise Lost far more than Fairfax or Cromwell. The speeches of the second book could only have been written by the citizen of a free state who had lived through a crisis in its fortunes. Other speeches in the poem—that incomparable one of Eve to Adam in the fourth book, "Sweet is the breath of morn," those that pass between Eve and Adam after the Fall and Adam's Job-like lament in the tenth book—have a purer human beauty about them: but of the oratory of debate no poem in the world provides a more magnificent display than the second book of Paradise Lost. The debate is a real debate. The opening of Moloch, "My sentence is for open war," would be instantly effective in any Parliament in the world. It {172} rouses attention by its directness, it compels adherence as only courage can. To undo its effect Belial has to employ the most subtle of all oratorical arts, that of accepting the arguments which he dare not directly combat and then gradually turning them to the confusion of their author. So he and Mammon bring the assembly completely round to the mood of ease and acquiescence. Then follows the tremendous figure of Beelzebub, an aged Chatham or Gladstone, who

"in his rising seemed A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat and public care; And princely counsel in his face yet shone, Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood, With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look Drew audience and attention still as night, Or summer's noon-tide air."

Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as it really would be is such that Beelzebub does not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy of war. To talk of fighting to cowed rebels who have just been taught the too pleasant lesson of the folly of further resistance would have been useless. So he begins by telling them that the ease promised to them is a delusion: they may submit, but submission {173} will never win them peace, or deliver them from their victorious enemy. Peace, then, they cannot have; and must have war: but it need not be open or dangerous: craft has its weapons as well as force: "what if we find Some easier enterprise" than the perilous folly of assaulting heaven?

Such a sketch may just serve to show that the great debate is a living thing in which we feel the temper of the audience submitting to the successive orators and in its turn reacting upon them. Another proof of the actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in which it can be quoted.

"I give not Heaven for lost;"

"Which, if not victory, is yet revenge:"

"What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not to be overcome:"

"what peace can we return But, to our power, hostility and hate?"

"This would surpass Common revenge, and interrupt his joy In our confusion:"

{174}

"Advise if this be worth Attempting, or to sit in darkness here Hatching vain empires:"

"What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not, what resolution from despair:"

"on whom we send The weight of all and our last hope relies:"

"This enterprise None shall partake with me."

All these have been or could well be hurled by contending Parliamentarians across the table of the House of Commons, often with a fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence emphasizing the pettiness of the ordinary political squabbles. But, of course, the theological questions which are at the root of Milton's debate make many of the arguments inapplicable to politics: indeed, what is probably the most remembered passage in all the speeches has nothing to do with social or political activities but draws its poignant interest from the secret thoughts that visit the hearts of men when they are most alone—

"And that must end us; that must be our cure, To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, {175} Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Devoid of sense and motion?"

Here we obviously go outside the dramatic probabilities: it is no longer Belial who is speaking: it is the voice of a highly cultivated and intellectual human being with all Greek thought behind him; it is, in short, Milton himself. The whole poem is full of such autobiographical confessional passages, either indirect like this or open and undisguised like the great introductions to the first, third, seventh and ninth books. This constant intervention of the poet in his epic is one of the originalities of Paradise Lost, and certainly not the least successful. The passages which are due to it have been criticized as irregularities or superfluities, but, as Johnson justly asked, "superfluities so beautiful who would take away?" Homer may be said never to allow us to do more than guess obscurely at what he himself was or thought or felt: so leaving room for the follies of the criticism which supposes him to be a kind of limited company of poets. Virgil spoke directly to his readers at least once in the Aeneid, in the most magnificent, and {176} most magnificently fulfilled, of all the poetic promises of eternal fame—

"Fortunati ambo! Si quid mea carmina possunt Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet aevo Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."

But it is less in such a direct intervention as this than in the whole tone and temper of his poem that he reveals to us his delicate and beautiful nature. Milton confesses himself in both ways. His high seriousness, his proud and resolute will, his grave sadness at the folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole of his story. Then in the speeches he will often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether who is speaking and where and when, forget Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell, and make his human escape to his own time and country and to himself. The extreme limitations of his subject made something of this kind almost necessary. When all had been done that simile and prophecy could do to bring in the life of men and women as Milton's readers knew it there still remained the difficulty that Adam and his angel visitors must talk, and that before the Fall there was almost {177} nothing for them to talk about. So they constantly talk as if they had all history behind them and the world's processes were to them, as to us, old and familiar things. "War seemed a civil game To this uproar," says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory. Often Milton calls attention, as it were, to his own inconsistencies, putting in an apology like that of Michael when he talks to Adam about Hamath and Hermon—

"Things by their names I call though yet unnamed;"

but more often he leaves them unexplained, perhaps not even noticing them himself. These difficulties are seen at their worst in the very earthly geography of heaven and its very unheavenly military operations: and, interesting as the passages are, it is difficult to forget the incongruity of Raphael and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam moralizing on the unhappiness of marriage as if he had studied the divorce reports or gone through a course of modern novels. Yet few and foolish are the readers who can dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam {178} is pouring out the bitter cry wrung from Milton by the still unforgotten miseries of his first marriage—

"Oh! why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven With Spirits masculine, create at last This novelty on Earth, this fair defect Of Nature, and not fill the World at once With men as Angels, without feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind? This mischief had not then befallen, And more that shall befall; innumerable Disturbances on Earth through female snares, And strait conjunction with this sex. For either He never shall find out fit mate, but such As some misfortune brings him, or mistake; Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain, Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained By a far worse, or, if she love, withheld By parents; or his happiest choice too late Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound To a fell adversary, his hate or shame; Which infinite calamity shall cause To human life, and household peace confound."

It is obvious that in all this we hear the poet's own voice. But it is scarcely fair to quote it without pointing out that it must {179} not be taken alone. The common notion that Milton's own melancholy experience had made him a purblind misogynist is a complete mistake. No one has praised marriage as he has. The chastest of poets is as little afraid as the Prayer Book of frank acceptance of the physical facts which must commonly be the basis of its spiritual relation. It is the whole union for which he stands, of body, mind, and spirit. He puts into the mouth of this same Adam the most eloquent praise woman ever received, culminating in

"All higher Knowledge in her presence falls Degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discountenanced, and like Folly shows; Authority and Reason on her wait, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally: and, to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat Build in her loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard angelic placed."

It is true that the reply of the Angel moderating these ardours is more evidently Miltonic—

"what transports thee so? An outside? fair no doubt and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love; Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself; Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right."

{180} But, though in these last words Raphael entirely disappears in Milton, the poet who could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael replies, who could elsewhere make his hero say that he received "access in every virtue" from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low ideal of what a woman may be. Adam speaks for him when he praises love as

"not the lowest end of human life;"

and he gives us a true corrective of the over-severe picture of Milton which half-knowledge is apt to draw when he goes on to declare that

"not to irksome toil, but to delight, He made us, and delight to reason joined."

But this is only one of many subjects on which Milton lets us hear his own voice speaking through his characters. We hear it when Satan cries to Beelzebub—

"Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering:"

when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of pain and pleasure what may well have been felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge of pleasure to memory only, while he knew {181} pain by the frequent experience of one of the most painful of diseases—

"sense of pleasure we may well Spare out of life, perhaps, and not repine, But live content, which is the calmest life; But pain is perfect misery, the worst Of evils, and, excessive, overturns All patience:"

we hear it when Adam, like a weary scholar, says that

"not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom;"

when Raphael asks, like a Platonic philosopher,

"what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?"

when Adam, like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation, hesitates for a moment about the efficacy of prayer—

"that from us aught should ascend to Heaven So prevalent as to concern the mind Of God high-blest, or to incline his will, Hard to belief may seem:"

{182} and once more when Adam cries—

"solitude sometimes is best society,"

as if he, like the blind Milton, was worn out by twenty years of contending voices, and longed for the relief of silent and lonely thought.

To the direct interventions of the poet there is less need to call attention as, of course, no reader can miss them. They are probably the most universally admired passages of the poem. Every reader who deserves to read them at all finds himself unable to do so without wishing to get them by heart. They do not rival the daring splendour of the scenes in hell: nor perhaps the suave and gracious perfection of the evening scene in Paradise in the fourth book; nor can they, of course, exhibit the dramatic power of the scene that precedes and still more of those that follow the Fall. But nothing in the whole poem moves us so much. It is not merely that Milton has exerted his whole mastery of his art to make their every line and every word please the ear, awaken the memory, stimulate the imagination, lift the whole mental and emotional nature of the reader up to a height of being unknown to its ordinary experience. This he has {183} done in some other parts of his poem. But, fine as some of his dramatic touches are, the essence of his genius was lyrical and not dramatic or objective at all. And so none of his characters, divine, diabolic or human, will ever move us quite as he moves us himself.

Let us hear the most beautiful of all these confessions: and for once let us indulge ourselves with the whole. The themes that make up Milton's great symphony ought in truth always to be given unbroken, if only that were possible. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be said that nothing less than the whole poem can do justice to a design so majestic as that of Paradise Lost. But in any case it is certain that no fragment of a few lines can convey a full impression of the rhythmical, intellectual, imaginative unity of the Miltonic paragraph or section. This is above all conspicuous in the great speeches and in the elaborate introductions that precede the first, third, seventh and ninth books. Here is the greatest of the four; the most famous of Milton's personal interventions in his poem, and one of the most wonderful things he ever wrote.

"Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born! Or of the Eternal coeternal beam {184} May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate! Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun, Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising World of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite! Thee I revisit now with bolder wing, Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight, Through utter and through middle Darkness borne, With other notes than to the Orphean lyre, I sung of Chaos and eternal Night, Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to re-ascend, Though hard and rare; thee I revisit safe, And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn; So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs, Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt {185} Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill, Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath, That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow, Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget Those other two equalled with me in fate, So were I equalled with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old: Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair, Presented with a universal blank Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. So much the rather thou, Celestial Light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight."

{186}

Not all the poetry of all the world can produce more than a few passages that equal this in moving power. Tears are not very far from the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so beautiful. But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged. No one would claim for him that he was one of the great narrative or dramatic masters. But his weakness on these sides is so obvious that there has been a tendency to exaggerate it. We notice the undramatic speeches of Satan and Adam: we notice such things as Eve's dream in the fifth book which, anticipating, as it does, so many of the details of her temptation, renders her fall much less probable, and goes far to destroy its interest when it occurs. But we are slower to notice the admirable dramatic management of such a scene as that between Eve and the Serpent in the ninth book. And yet how finely imagined it is, in all its successive stages! Satan, at first "stupidly good," overawed at Eve's beauty and innocence; then, recovering his natural malice, and beginning his attempt by appealing to {187} two things, curiosity and the love of flattery, which have always been supposed especially powerful with women; and Eve, taking no direct notice of his compliments and in appearance surrendering only to the other bait of novelty and surprise; "how cam'st thou speakable of mute?" So the scene begins. Flattery has ensured the tempter a favourable reception; curiosity gives him the chance of an apparently telling argument. I ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and received from it speech and reason. But I have found nothing to satisfy my new-won powers till I saw thee, whom I now desire to worship as the sovran of creation. She affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally asks to be shown the tree on which the wonderful fruit grows. It of course turns out to be the Forbidden Tree: and Eve mentions the prohibition as a thing final and unquestionable. He meets her refusal by giving a sinister and plausible explanation of the prohibition. Why did God forbid her the fruit? "Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers?" God, he suggests, knows too well that as the fruit had raised the serpent from brute to human, so it would raise the woman from human to divine. Noon and hunger come to fortify his {188} arguments; and, after a speech in which she adds one more of her own drawn from the name, the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by God Himself, she plucks and eats. In the first ecstasy of pleasure she luxuriates in joy and self-confidence. Then she considers whether she shall use her new powers to make herself the equal and even the superior of Adam. The prospect tempts her: but she is not quite free from fear that the threatened punishment of death may after all descend upon her. And that suggests the picture of "Adam wedded to another Eve," which brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam shall share with her her fate, whichever it be, bliss or woe. In this, as later in her hasty proposal of suicide, Eve is a living and convincing human figure. To the stronger and wiser Adam it was harder to give life. But what could be finer or truer than his instant repudiation of her plausible tale—

"How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost, Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!"

followed by his immediate resolution to die with her—

"And me with thee hath ruined: for with thee Certain my resolution is to die. How can I live without thee?"

{189} The rest follows with equal probability. Once resolved to unite his lot with hers, he soon finds arguments to prove that that lot is not likely after all to be so dreadful. Having talked himself into the surrender of his judgment he eats, and having eaten he goes at once all lengths of extravagance, folly and sin. Then comes the reaction and the inevitable mutual reproaches; with the fine natural touch of Eve upbraiding Adam for his weakness in yielding to her request and granting her the freedom which had proved so fatal. So the ninth book closes. When the story is resumed in the second half of the tenth book we get the tremendous lamentation of Adam, so strangely undramatic in its argumentative justification of his own punishment, so full of true drama as well as of magnificent lyrical power in its cry of human misery and despair. Then follows the bitter attack upon Eve, as the cause of all his woe: and the whole scene is concluded by her humble and beautiful submission—

"While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps, Between us two let there be peace:"

by their reconciliation, and by their quiet and resigned acceptance of their common fate.

{190}

It was perhaps worth while to go through one act of Milton's drama in this detail to give some idea of the skill which he has shown in working up a few verses of Genesis into an elaborate story. But no detail, no fragmentary notes of any kind, even when they deal with matters in which Milton was far stronger than he was on the side of narrative or drama, can do much to exhibit the greatness of Paradise Lost. For that there is only one way, to read it. And, as we said just now, to read the whole. It is true that you cannot read it for the interest of the story as you can all the Odyssey, much of the Iliad and some of the Aeneid: but the poem is still a whole and you need the whole to judge and understand it. And even the weaker books, the fifth, the seventh and twelfth, contain episodes, like the scene between Abdiel and Satan and the incomparable conclusion of the whole poem, which are among the last a wise reader would wish to miss. Moreover, where the story is dullest it has things which give, perhaps, the most astonishing proof of Milton's power of style. It is true that he does himself occasionally fall into the empty pomposity which characterized his eighteenth-century imitators who fancied that big words could turn prose into poetry. So he talks of dried fruits as "what by frugal {191} storing firmness gains To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes." But the thing most remarkable about this is its extreme rarity. Taking the poem as a whole, the mighty music scarcely ceases: the majestic flight of the poet continues uninterrupted: no contrary winds disturb it, no weariness brings it flagging down to earth. There is nothing, not even theological disputes, out of which he cannot make fine verse, and occasionally great poetry. There is nothing, however great, that he cannot make his own. Just as Shakspeare took the noble prose of North's Plutarch, and hardly altering a word made noble poetry of it, so Milton can take the Bible. "For now," says Job, "I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could have touched it at all without desecration. "How glad," says Adam—

"how glad would lay me down As in my mother's lap! There I should rest, And sleep secure."

Or take a passage like that of the Son of God clothing Adam and Eve after the Fall, where {192} many Biblical suggestions are gathered together—

"As when he washed his servants' feet, so now As father of his family he clad Their nakedness with skins of beasts, or slain, Or, as the snake, with youthful coat repaid; And thought not much to clothe his enemies."

The full appreciation of a passage like this, so very simple, so apparently obvious, yet so entirely in the grand style which, whether his subject stoops or soars, very rarely fails Milton, is not a thing of one reading or of two. Milton, the greatest artist of our language, is naturally the most conspicuous instance of the law which applies to all great art. Only natures as rarely endowed with the receptive gift as he was himself with the creative can fully appreciate his work at the first reading. Like all great works of the imagination it has generally to train, sometimes almost to create, the faculties which are to appreciate it aright. This is particularly true in the case of classical art, where the emotional appeal, though just as real, is much less apparent because it is so much more controlled by intellectual sanity. Gothic {193} and Romantic art are commonly far more instantaneous in the impression they make, perhaps because, according to the ingenious suggestion of the Poet Laureate, they admit at once of more daring flights of the imagination and of stronger realism than classical art can bear. But it may well be doubted whether the wonder and delight which every man of the most modest aesthetic capacity owes to them can in the end keep pace with the slower growing appreciation of the universality and sanity of classical work. But this is an old dispute not likely to be settled this year or next. Nor does it affect the fact that all great work, even Romantic or Gothic, gains by time in proportion to its greatness. It is the only absolutely certain test of greatness in art. The instantly popular tune is unendurable in six months, the instantly popular novel or poem is totally forgotten in a year or two. No one perceives the whole greatness of St. Paul's Cathedral, or Sansovino's Library at Venice, or the music of Bach, or the poetry of Milton, at the first sight or hearing. No competent eye, ear or mind fails to perceive more and more of it at each renewed experience. Whatever be the art, a picture, a piece of sculpture, a book, the test is the same: the cheap, the sentimental, {194} the sensational, the merely pretty, lose something, be it little or much, at each renewal of acquaintance: the great work steadily gains. To this test Paradise Lost can fearlessly appeal. It is not meant for idle hours or empty people. It is not amusing in the lower sense of the word. It is not as exciting as it might well have been. It is probably true that, as Johnson said with his usual honesty, "No one ever wished it longer than it is": yet there is equal truth in another remark of his, "I cannot wish Milton's work other than it is," and in the implied answer to his bold question, "What other author ever soared so high or sustained his flight so long?" The difficulty for Milton's readers is that they do not easily soar, and still less easily sustain their soaring. The great gifts which Johnson brought to the criticism of literature lay far more in common sense and in a profound insight into human life than in any real turn for poetry. Of that nearly every one who to-day gives much time to reading poetry will probably have as much as he. Such people are sometimes mistakenly content with a single reading of Paradise Lost. They remember a few of its glories and the rest of the poem they acquiesce in forgetting. Let them put it to the test to which lovers of music {195} put the Symphonies of Beethoven and lovers of sculpture the remains of the Parthenon and the temple of the Ephesian Artemis. Let them give the little time required to read it through every year, or every second year. They will find more in it the second time than they did the first, and much more the fifth or the tenth time. It will issue triumphantly from the trial: and before they reach middle age they will know by their own personal experience, what the best authorities have always told them, that this is one of those rare works of human genius whose power and beauty may in sober truth be called inexhaustible.



{196}

CHAPTER V

PARADISE REGAINED AND SAMSON AGONISTES

Paradise Regained, like the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the second part of Faust, has been an inevitable victim of the human taste for comparison. It cannot fail to be compared with Paradise Lost and cannot fail to suffer by it. The poets and critics have indeed been kinder to it than the public. Johnson said that if it had not been written by Milton "it would receive universal praise." Wordsworth thought it "the most perfect in execution of anything written by Milton." But the great body of readers finds an epic with only two main actors in it, and hardly anything that can be called a story, too severe a demand upon its poetic taste. And when unprofessional opinion remains constant for several generations, as it has in this case, it is never wise to ignore or defy it. Paradise Regained is a very bare poem. It has none of the splendours of its predecessor: no {197} scenes in which we hear the full voice of that Milton

"Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset;"

nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the scenes of Adam's

"bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches."

It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all. And Milton has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which are among the chief glories of Paradise Lost. It is, in fact, as Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language."

At the very beginning of Paradise Lost Milton had cast his eye on to that second chapter in the Christian history of man without which the first is a mere picture of despair. His subject was to be man's first disobedience and its results; death, woe and loss of Eden

"till one greater Man Restore us and regain the blissful seat."

{198} Whether he then had any thought of attempting to deal with that restoration we do not know. Nor do we know what motives induced him to choose the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness as the action in which the new order of things was to be manifested. Some critics have been surprised that he did not take the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. And it is obvious that the first, with the Tree of Calvary pointing back to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded a natural sequence to Paradise Lost. Others have wondered that he did not use the Descent into Hell in which the liberation of Satan's captives would have followed on the story of how they fell into his power. And it is obvious that there were great poetic, and especially Miltonic, possibilities in the theme of the victorious Son of God entering the very kingdom in which the Satan of Paradise Lost had exercised such splendid rule, and setting free the saints and prophets and kings of the Old Testament. But it is possible, as Sir Walter Raleigh has suggested, that Milton was no longer in the vein for grandiose themes of external majesty and might such as this story would have afforded. "His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of the wise than in the deeds of the mighty." That {199} may be so: though his Samson which was yet to come is certainly not without its mighty deeds. But, whatever were his reasons for putting aside such subjects as the Descent into Hell, it is not difficult to discover several which he probably found decisive in inducing him to prefer the Temptation to the Passion. To begin with, he must have been conscious of the immensely greater difficulty of handling the story of the Passion in such a way that Christian readers could bear to read it. Then, even more certainly operative on his mind was the fact that the Passion is related to us in great detail, the Temptation in a few words of mysterious import; so that the one leaves almost no freedom of invention to the poet, while the other scarcely binds him at all. Then again there is the close parallelism between the temptation in the Garden and the temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, most important of all, the fact that the Temptation is the only event in the life of Christ in which Satan plays a visible and important part. A poem that was to be a second part of Paradise Lost could not do without Satan; and in fact he is even more prominent in Paradise Regained, where he is present throughout, than in its predecessor of which there are several books which scarcely so {200} much as mention him. This was no doubt decisive.

So Milton chose the Temptation in the Wilderness as his subject, with Satan once more as one of the two principal actors in his story. But the actor is even more changed than the story. The Satan of the later poem is no longer the splendid rebel of Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained has in it no heavenly battles and its council of devils is a mere shadow of the great parliament of hell. It has, therefore, no place either for the general of the infernal armies or for the Prime Minister of the infernal Senate. The magnificent figure who imposes himself on the imagination—

"Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved"—

becomes in it something far less impressive, a political theorist instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a devil venturing all for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander were exchanged for Aristotle: almost as if St. George were replaced by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. The imagination is affected by the inevitable loss of colour, and Paradise Regained is the sufferer in fame and popularity. It also suffers from the old difficulty {201} inherent in supernatural personages which affects it even more than Paradise Lost. The whole action is a succession of Temptations. The question how far such attempts by a devil upon a Divine Being can afford any hope to the one or any fear or danger to the other is a mystery of which the Church itself scarcely claims to offer a full explanation. Into the theological difficulty this is not the place to enter. It is only with the corresponding poetic difficulty which we are concerned. Just as in Paradise Lost it is impossible not to feel the unreality of the war in heaven, so in Paradise Regained it is impossible not to feel, in spite of some inconsistency of language on the subject, that Satan commonly knows who it is whom he is assailing and is known by Him in return, and that consequently the whole action has for poetic purposes a certain unreality. He knows that Jesus is the Son of God; with a right to the homage of all nature and the power to take all as His own. He asks—

"Hast thou not right to all created things? Owe not all creatures, by just right, to thee service?"

Yet he discusses with Him various very human methods of arriving at power, just as {202} if He were subject to the same conditions as other men who desire to rule or influence the world. The consequence is that, although the speeches contain much interesting thought and much fine poetry, they are seldom or never dramatically convincing. Our Lord, in particular, instead of the gracious and winning figure of the Gospels, becomes a kind of self-sufficient aristocratic moralist. His speeches, as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant virtue of the Stoic, or the self-conscious righteousness of the Pharisee, than the simple and loving charity of the Christian. The weapon of moral and intellectual contempt, so freely employed in them and so natural both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a false and jarring note when put into the mouth of Him who taught His disciples that the only way of entry into His kingdom was that of being born again and becoming as little children.

These are all serious drawbacks and they are not the only ones. If from one point of view Milton in Paradise Regained is too little of a Christian, from another he is too much. One of the gravest difficulties with which Christian apologists have always had to contend is the entire indifference of the New Testament and, generally speaking, of the {203} Church in all ages, especially the most devout, not only to economic and material progress, but to all elements except the ethical and spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity. At its friendliest the Church has hardly ever been willing to allow to such things any inherent or independent importance of their own. Those who feel that they owe an incalculable debt to art and poetry and philosophy and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably found this attitude a stumbling-block. And they will always read with exceptional surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the mouth of Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself have been a victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows that he did not think Greek poetry was

"Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight."

Nor could he have seriously thought that the Hebrew prophets taught "the solid rules of civil government," of which in fact they knew nothing except on the moral side, better than the statesmen and philosophers of Rome and {204} Athens. The explanation is, perhaps, partly that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt at liberty to emphasize the Jewish limitations of Christ: limitations the possibility of which, as recent controversies have shown, even Athanasian opinion has been forced to face. But, in any case, in the Paradise Regained stress is necessarily, for dramatic purposes, laid on the Hebrew and Messianic character of Christ, and from that point of view it is not unnatural to make Him the spokesman of Hebrew resistance to the intellectual encroachments of Greece and Rome. Another part of the explanation is that the strong Biblical and Hebraic element in Milton's character does seem to have increased in strength during his later years. It was far from getting exclusive possession even then, and all the evidence shows that he was always the very opposite of the narrow-minded Puritan fanatics of his day. But his tendencies in that direction would be exaggerated while he was occupied with a purely Biblical subject. And he may have thought, if he thought about the question at all, that the contemptuous tone adopted about classical culture in the speech of Christ was not only dramatically defensible, but balanced by the far finer passage, evidently written from his {205} heart, in which Satan exalts the glories of Athens. It is, perhaps, the most famous thing in the poem.

"Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount, Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold Where on the Aegean shore a city stands, Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil— Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence, native to famous wits Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, City or suburban, studious walks and shades. See there the olive-grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long; There flow'ry hill Hymettus, with the sound Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls His whispering stream. Within the walls then view The schools of ancient sages, his who bred Great Alexander to subdue the world, Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next. There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit By voice or hand, and various-measured verse, Aeolian charms and Dorian lyric odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, {206} Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called, Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own. Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts, while they treat Of fate, and chance, and change in human life, High actions and high passions best describing."

It is plainly the very voice of the poet himself, and he may have felt certain that we should so understand it. But it is difficult not to regret that it is the Devil who is made to pay Milton's great debt to Athens and Christ who is made to repudiate it.

Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of its disdain of the obvious attractions open to poetry, in spite of much in it that alienates the sympathies of many, the Paradise Regained has received very high praise from the finest judges of English poetry. Johnson and Wordsworth have already been quoted, and to them may be added Coleridge, who says of it that "in its kind it is the most perfect poem extant," and Mr. Mackail, who has spoken of its "unique poetic qualities." Why have the poets and critics been so much {207} more favourable to it than the public? Perhaps because artists are always inclined to value work in proportion to its difficulties. Indeed, this fallacy seems natural to all classes of men about their own work. Gardeners in England tend to admire a man who grows indifferent oranges more than a man who grows good strawberries. It is like what Johnson said of the preaching lady: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." This tendency to let surprise sit in the seat which belongs to judgment is greatly intensified by professional knowledge. The architect is apt to exaggerate the merit of a building placed on a very awkward site, the artist to think a piece of very difficult foreshortening more beautiful than it really is. The public may not be so good a judge either of the building or of the drawing: but, knowing nothing of the technical difficulties, it at least forms its judgment on the true criterion which is, of course, the value of the product, not the surprisingness of its having been produced or the difficulties overcome in its production.

Something of this kind may account for the fact that Paradise Regained has been more appreciated by the poets than by the public. {208} The public finds it rather bare and dry and judges accordingly. The poets know how infinitely hard a task it was that Milton set himself, and find no praise too great for the man who did not fail in it. They see a poem of two thousand lines whose single subject is the attempt of a devil who knows himself doomed to defeat to persuade a divine Person who knows Himself assured of victory to be false to the law of His being. And into this barren theme they see art and nature, ethics and politics, luxury and splendour and empire, cunningly interwoven and

"Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."

They see a style stripped of almost all ornament especially in the speeches of our Lord: the poet deliberately walking always on the very edge of the gulf of prose and yet always as one perfectly assured that into that gulf his feet can never fall. Here and there, as when we come upon such lines as

"I never liked thy talk, thy offers less,"

we are nervous as we watch: but the poet passes on his way serenely unconscious of our fears, and in the very next speech is on the heights of poetry with the great description {209} of Athens. Once only, perhaps, in the reply to Satan after the storm—

"Me worse than wet thou find'st not,"

we feel that the cunningly maintained balance has failed and that the limit has been passed which divides the severe from the grotesque.

The truth is that, if the narrowness of its subject and the austerity of its style be admitted, Paradise Regained is a poetic achievement as great as it is surprising. It cannot be Paradise Lost, of course, and that is the fault for which it has not been forgiven. And its fine things are even less evident, much less evident, at a first reading than those of Paradise Lost. But Milton has left nothing more Miltonic. He did greater things but nothing in which he stands so entirely alone. There is no poem in English, perhaps none in any language of the world, which exhibits to the same degree the inherent power of style itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any of its visible accessories. There are in it, of course, some passages of characteristic splendour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision of Rome, and others; but a large part of the poem is as bare as the mountains and, to the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and forbidding. Its grave Dorian music, scarcely {210} heard by the sensual ear, is played by the mind to the spirit and by the spirit to the mind. Ever present as its art is, it is an art infinitely removed from that to which all the world at once responds and surrenders. It is not at first seen to be art at all. The verse which in truth dances so cunningly appears to the uninitiated to stumble and halt. The music, which the common ear is so slow to catch, makes us think of those Platonic mysteries of abstract number seen only in their perfection by some godlike mathematician who lives rapt above sense and matter in the contemplation of the Idea of Good.

But, if there is much in an art so consummate as Milton's which escapes analysis, there are also elements which can be measured and weighed. Here as in the Paradise Lost students of metre can count and compare his stresses and pauses, and set out some finite portion of the infinite variety of rhythms which, even more needed here than in Paradise Lost, sustain the poem in its difficult flight over so apparently barren a country. The art of the poet as distinct from the musician is less difficult to trace. An avowed sequel has to recall its predecessor and yet not to recall it too much. Paradise Regained recalls Paradise Lost by its central action, a {211} temptation, by its council of devils, by its assembly of the heavenly host, by a hundred echoes of phrase and circumstance. But though the heavenly host is itself unchanged, though it is still the old "full frequence bright Of Angels" yet there is now no real council. The Son, the only spokesman who can address the Father, is no longer present, and even the hymn of the angels gets no more than a vague description. A greater change has come over the infernal council: scarcely any longer infernal, for their leader can now open his address to them with

"O ancient Powers of Air and this wide World,"

and the meeting is held in mid air and no longer in hell. Nor is any rivalry attempted with the great debate of Paradise Lost: only enough to awaken its memory in the reader and to enable the poet to find a place in the second meeting for the most obvious of temptations which yet reverence forbade him to introduce into the main action. And note how this contains at least one of those small dramatic touches for which, except from Mr. Mackail, Milton has got too little credit. Satan asks how he is to assail the new enemy: and Belial, who stands for the sensualist man of the world, at once offers his suggestion. {212} He is sure, as such men always are, that the lowest motive is invariably the true mainspring and explanation of all human actions: there is no beating about the bush with him: he is frank and cynical, and begins at once without shame, apology or preface—

"Set women in his eye and in his walk."

What could be more exactly in the downright manner affected by men of his type in the world of to-day and every day? And there are other similar touches. Then again the sequel recalls its predecessor when we hear Satan strike the very note he struck so often in Paradise Lost—

"'Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate,"

and when we see him fall in ruin at the awful end of the long debate—

"Now shew thy progeny; if not to stand Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God; For it is written: 'He will give command Concerning thee to his Angels: in their hands They shall uplift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.' To whom thus Jesus: Also it is written 'Tempt not the Lord thy God.' He said, and stood: But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell."

{213}

Nor must it be supposed by those who have not read the Paradise Regained that the bareness of its style is invariable. Most conspicuous, for reasons of reverence no doubt, in the speeches of Christ, it is far less marked in those of Satan and disappears altogether in some of the descriptive passages. Take, for instance, the famous temptation of the banquet—

"He spake no dream; for, as his words had end, Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld In ample space under the broadest shade, A table richly spread in regal mode, With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Grisamber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin, And exquisitest name, for which was drained Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. Alas, how simple, to these cates compared, Was that crude apple that diverted Eve! And at a stately sideboard, by the wine, That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue Than Ganymed or Hylas; distant more, Under the trees now tripped, now solemn stood, Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn, {214} And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since Of faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore."

Paradise Lost itself contains no more intricately beautiful passage than this. It is one of those things that have been the delight and despair of poets ever since. For all his disdain of the follies of the Middle Age Milton can never touch the old romances, as Joseph Warton well noted, without immediately rising into the most exquisite poetry: and this reluctant homage of classical genius is the greatest tribute ever paid to their undying fascination.

But of course such a passage as this is not typical of the poem: it is one of its far-shining heights which cannot be altogether missed even by eyes quite blind to the beauties of the lower country through which Paradise Regained takes the most part of its course. Ordinarily the poem is grave, plain and unadorned, engaged in the discussion of moral problems which give little opportunity for the more obvious graces of poetry. The interest of the speeches which constitute the bulk of it is threefold: technical, in the rhythmical or metrical skill by which Milton sustains an {215} abstract discourse expressed in unadorned language and keeps it at the level of high poetry; moral or intellectual, the interest of the subjects discussed; and, the greatest of all for many readers, autobiographical, the interest of the evidence they afford of the poet's own thoughts and character. All may be seen, for instance, in such a confession as that of Satan in the first book—

"Envy, they say, excites me, thus to gain Companions of my misery and woe! At first it may be; but, long since with woe Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof That fellowship in pain divides not smart, Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load."

There is scarcely a word in it that prose cannot use even to-day. The thought is one that might come from any moralist; there is nothing daring or imaginative about it. Yet out of this what poetry Milton has made! The personal emotion of it, the note of confession and individual experience, has lifted it altogether above the level of the cold maxims of the preacher who gives no sign of having suffered, or sinned, or so much as lived, himself. Then the art of it: so entirely unperceived by the ordinary reader, so invincible in its effect upon him. The whole secret of it defies analysis: but a few ingredients can {216} be detected. There is comparatively little of Milton's favourite alliteration: the tone of the passage is too quiet for the free use of an artistic device so instantly visible. But note the beautiful line—

"Companions of my misery and woe"—

itself free flowing without a pause of any kind, so as to prepare the better for the full pause both of sense and of rhythm which separates it from what follows. Then there is the vivid conversational "At first it may be," and its pause, contrasting so finely with the next line where the pause is also after the fifth syllable, but with a totally different effect. Note again the variety of rhythm which distinguishes the last two lines. Neither has any strong pause in it: and they might so easily have been a monotonous repetition. Is it fanciful to think that, perhaps half unconsciously, Milton has suggested the quick stab of pain or sorrow in the swift movement of the first: and that the long-drawn rhythm of the second is meant to convey something of the dull years of misery which so often follow? Its first six syllables—

"Nor lightens aught each man's,"

if given their full effect of sound, take perhaps half as long again to read as the first six of the {217} preceding line. In any case, whatever was meant by it, the line is a most beautiful one in itself, as well as full of one of the most moving of human things, a strong man's confession that his strength does not always suffice him.

These obviously autobiographical passages are to be found all through the poem. There are the stately Roman embassies coming and going in all their pomp: in which it is surely Cromwell's Foreign Secretary who sees nothing but

"tedious waste of time, to sit and hear So many hollow compliments and lies, Outlandish flatteries."

There is the old contempt of war and those who in virtue of their victories

"swell with pride, and must be titled Gods,"

and of the mob who praise and admire

"they know not what, And know not whom, but as one leads the other; And what delight to be by such extolled, To live upon their tongues and be their talk? Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise, His lot who dares be singularly good."

There is the contempt of wealth—

"Extol not riches then, the toil of fools, The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare;"

{218} a contempt which Milton shares with nearly all saints and heroes and most philosophers; a little ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting that, compared with the mass of men, he had himself always been rich, and that what he owed to the toil of his father had not proved in his case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the learning and the leisure he had used so nobly. Finally, to give no more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so representative of the feeling of all men who have ever made the smallest effort to live well—

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song."

Who knows whether behind such words as these there lies the memory of some rapturous vision of the new world of love as St. Paul saw it, which had been cooled only too soon by humbling experience of the difficulty of "bearing all things" when all things included Salmasius, or an unthankful daughter?

This grave introspective note, present from the first in everything written by Milton and far more conspicuous in Paradise Regained than in Paradise Lost, is felt still more in the {219} last of his works, the drama Samson Agonistes. It is in the Greek form with a Chorus: and is as broodingly full as Aeschylus or Sophocles of the folly of man and the uncertainty and sadness of human life; but Milton has added an angry sternness of judgment on the one hand, and on the other an assured faith in divine deliverance, both of which are rather Hebrew than Greek. Into this strange drama, so alien from all the literature of his day, Milton has poured all the thoughts and emotions with which the spectacle of his own life filled him. All through it we hear a faith that was strong but never blind battling with the spectacle of the wickedness of men and the dark uncertainty of the ways of God. The Philistines have triumphed, lords sit "lordly in their wine" at Whitehall, the Dagon of prelatism is once more enthroned throughout the land, the saints are dispersed and forsaken, and he himself, who had as he thought so signally borne his witness for God, sits blind and sad in his lonely house, "to visitants a gaze Or pitied object," with no hope left of high service to his country and no prospect but that of a "contemptible old age obscure." No doubt he did not always feel like that, for the evidence shows him cheerful and friendly in company: and, of {220} course, the picture has undergone the imaginative heightening of art besides being coloured by the story of Samson, so much sadder than Milton's own. But the lonely hours of a blind man of genius who has fought for a great cause and been utterly defeated must often be full of the hopeless half-resigned and half-rebellious broodings in which throughout Samson we hear so plainly the voice of Milton himself.

"God of our fathers! what is Man, That thou towards him with hand so various— Or might I say contrarious?— Temper'st thy providence through his short course; Not evenly, as thou rulest The angelic orders and inferior creatures mute, Irrational and brute? Nor do I name of men the common rout, That wandering loose about Grow up and perish as the summer fly, Heads without name, no more remembered; But such as thou hast solemnly elected, With gifts and graces eminently adorned, To some great work, thy glory, And people's safety, which in part they effect: Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft, Amidst their highth of noon, Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard Of highest favours past From thee on them, or them to thee of service."

{221} This is Milton undisguised speaking of and for himself. And so is the still sadder outburst in the very first speech of Samson—

"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first-created beam, and thou great Word, 'Let there be light, and light was over all'; Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree? The Sun to me is dark And silent as the Moon When she deserts the night, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. Since light so necessary is to life, And almost life itself, if it be true That light is in the soul, She all in every part, why was the sight To such a tender ball as the eye confined, So obvious and so easy to be quenched, And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused, That she might look at will through every pore? Then had I not been thus exiled from light, As in the land of darkness, yet in light, To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but, O yet more miserable! Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave; Buried, yet not exempt, By privilege of death and burial, From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs, But made hereby obnoxious more {222} To all the miseries of life, Life in captivity Among inhuman foes."

This sublime music in which the soul's emotion finds and obeys its own law was scarcely audible to the age which followed Milton's death, when poets had concentrated all their art on the effort to make both language and metre as instantaneously intelligible as possible. They succeeded much better in the second task than in the first: for the truth is that the exact meaning of a verse is much more often difficult to ascertain in the case of Pope than in the case of Milton. But no one has ever doubted how to read aloud a line of Pope or Dryden. And this has obvious advantages and was, of course, at first a great source of pleasure. It made Pope's poetry the most immediately popular we have ever had, as it still is the most effective for public quotation. Almost everybody, as Mr. Bridges has said, "has a natural liking for the common fundamental rhythms" and "it is only after long familiarity with them that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes them to be broken." But in poetry as in music the more cultivated the ear the sooner it gets tired of being given too little to do: and as soon as every warbler had Pope's {223} tune by heart critical readers began to wish for something less obvious. The ultimate result of that dissatisfaction was the metrical experiments of Coleridge and the rich harvest of varied rhythms and melody with which Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne enriched the nineteenth century. And all this movement had also, of course, a retrospective effect. It may be true that, as Mr. Bridges says, "there are very few persons indeed who take such a natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction;" but it could not fail to be the case that their number was increased by the comparative sensitiveness to the more intricate music of words which was inevitably produced in those who had learnt much Shelley or Tennyson by heart. And such people at once heard things in Milton which were absolutely inaudible to the ears of Dr. Johnson's generation. The comparative subtlety, both in imagination and in form, of the poetry of the nineteenth century made it impossible for poets to compete with journalists for the attention of the big public as Pope had done triumphantly; but as a set off against that loss it gave a far {224} richer delight to those who were capable of that interaction of the natural ear and the spiritual to which all great poetry makes its appeal. This led straight back to Milton who made that double appeal as only a very few poets in all the world have ever made it. And the more poetry is studied and loved as the greatest of the arts, as the medium through which that combination of the vision of genius with the slow trained cunning of the craftsman, which is what great art is, finds its most perfect expression, the more will men, or at least Englishmen, return to Milton. And especially, in some ways, to Samson, where his art is at its boldest and freest, and where it suffered longest from the indifference of dull ears.

A little book of this kind is not the place for a discussion of English metre, or even, in any detail, of Milton's. Those who wish to go into such studies will find much of what they want in the Poet Laureate's book on Milton's Prosody. It is possible to disagree with some of his proposed scansions of doubtful lines, but it is impossible not to learn a great deal from suggestions as to the rhythmical effects intended by Milton which come, as these do, from one who is himself a master of rhythm and has never concealed the fact {225} that Milton's was one of the schools in which he passed his apprenticeship. So his analysis, line by line, of the opening of the first chorus of Samson will be a revelation to many of what they have, perhaps, never felt at all, or felt only unconsciously without understanding anything of what it was which they felt or why. But even without such help no one whose ear has had the smallest training can fail to notice some of the more daring of Milton's metrical effects. In the lines quoted above, for instance, who can miss the triple stab of passionate agony in the thrice repeated, strongly accented "dark, dark, dark"? The most careless reader cannot fail to be arrested by the line, though he may not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing the required effects. And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm of the words which express the calming aspiration up to the throne of God, and the quiet {226} mono-syllabic simplicity of the divine utterance, "Let there be light," which continues its softening influence over the return in the following lines to his own sad conditions. How smoothly the complaint now goes: "The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon." It is in comparison with the earlier abruptness as if he had gone through something like the process of the psalmist, "until I went into the sanctuary of God: then understood I" what had before been "too painful for me." Then there is the comparatively unmarked rhythm of the intellectual argumentative passage which follows: till emotion begins again to overwhelm reflection, and shows itself in the strong alliteration of "light," "land," "light," "live," "life," "living," and in the strong caesura after "buried," the more marked for coming so early in the verse.

Such poor noting of technicalities as this gives, of course, no more of the secret of Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives of the power and beauty of the human body. But it has its interest and even its use: provided that too much importance is not attributed to it and that no one makes the mistake of the lady who, according to the story, hopefully asked the painter what he mixed {227} his paints with, and received the crushing reply, "With my brains, Madam."

Samson Agonistes stands in marked contrast to its predecessor, Paradise Regained. And not only in being a drama. Its intense omnipresent emotion makes a still more important difference. In passing from one to the other we pass from the least to the most emotional of Milton's works. This would in any case have been a gain for most readers: but the gain is made more important by the extreme severity of Milton's final poetic manner. A style which excludes almost all ornament stands in especial need of the support of a visibly felt emotion. It has been said by a living writer that "when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose." This is roughly true, though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff. The special faculty of the poet, as Johnson well said, is that of joining music with reason. That is to say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the "unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as thought and memory in his words: when Shelley cries in his despair—

"Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more—O never more!"

it is no mere cry of the heart: the mind is in it too: and neither in him nor in Wordsworth can you get the two apart again after the poet has joined them together.

Now, though in Paradise Regained the intellect is not allowed, as in much eighteenth-century poetry, to become so dominant as to make us feel that prose and not verse was the proper medium for what the poet had to say, yet it does play a greater part than it can commonly play with safety, perhaps a greater part than it plays in any other English poem of the first rank. It is only Milton's unfailing gift of poetic style which saves the situation. He could do what Wordsworth could not: conduct long discussions on abstract questions without descending from the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room. The gallant explorer who fights his way through the Prelude and the Excursion wins, as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater still if he does it a second time and a third, {229} when he has learnt that they both have marshy valleys into which he need not twice descend. But he has paid a price for the lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great deal of solid and heavy prose. That is partly because Wordsworth often thinks without feeling or imagining: he gives us his thought as it is in itself, as a professor of moral philosophy gives it, without passing it through the transforming processes of the emotions and the imagination. These hardly fail Milton half a dozen times in all his poetry: and the result is the difference between such lines as—

"This is the genuine course, the aim, and end Of prescient reason; all conclusions else Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse:"

and such as Milton writes when he is nearest to bare thinking—

"Who therefore seeks in these True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, An empty cloud."

The difference is also partly due to what, indeed, is another side of the same distinction; the fact that Wordsworth has not and Milton has a constant possession of the great or grand style. This is plain in such passages as those just quoted: it is plainer still where the poets come close to each other in {230} descriptive passages; as, for instance, in Wordsworth's—

"Negro ladies in white muslin gowns,"

and Milton's—

"Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;"

between which yawns an obviously impassable gulf.

Milton is sometimes harsh, crabbed, grim in expression as in thought: but these things are not at all necessarily fatal to poetry as is the cool and contented obviousness of Wordsworth's weak moments. Milton is occasionally contented in his own lofty fashion, but he is never cool, and never less so than in Samson. All through it he is face to face with a tremendous issue in which he himself is supremely interested: he is "enacting hell," to use Goethe's curious phrase, which fits Milton so much better than it fits the serenity of Homer. Twenty years before he had written, in quite another connection, "No man knows hell like him who converses most in heaven": and now in his old age he embodies that tremendous truth in his last poem. All his poems are intensely emotional and personal: but none so much so as Samson Agonistes, where he is fixing all eyes on the {231} tragedy of his own life. The parallel between Samson and Milton does not extend, of course, to all the details. But even of them many correspond, such as the blindness, the disastrous marriage with "the daughter of an infidel," the old age of a broken and defeated champion of God become a gazing-stock to triumphant profanity. But more than any special circumstance it is the whole general position of Samson as a man dedicated from his birth to the service of God, and gladly accepting the dedication, yet failing in his task and apparently deserted by his God, which makes of him a type in which Milton can see himself and the Cromwellian saints who lie ground under the heels of the victorious Philistines of the Restoration. To him as to Samson the situation is one that makes questionings on the dark and doubtful ways of God unavoidable: darker to him even than to Samson: for he has no guilty memory of a supreme act of folly to explain the divine desertion.

The action of the drama is extremely simple. Samson is found enjoying a brief respite from his punishment. The day is a feast of Dagon, and the Philistine "superstition" allows no work to be done on it. Accordingly an attendant who is a mute person is leading {232} him to a bank where he is accustomed to take what rest he is allowed and enjoy

"The breath of heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet With day-spring born;"

that sensation of delicate scents and cool breezes which, as Milton knew only too well, mean so much more to the blind than to those who can see. Then his restless thoughts begin to crowd upon him—

"Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed As of a person separate to God, Designed for great exploits?"

The whole passage belongs naturally enough to Samson: but obviously here, as well as in the blindness, the poet is already thinking of himself. So again, when Samson proceeds to speak of being

"exposed To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,"

one can scarcely miss a reference to the daughters who purloined and sold the blind father's books. When the soliloquy draws to an end the Chorus, men of his tribe, come to visit Samson. Not even Milton ever made the arrangement and sound of words do more to enforce their meaning than he does in this wonderful opening chorus—

{233}

"This, this is he; softly a while; Let us not break in upon him. O change beyond report, thought, or belief!"

They chant their inevitable wonder at the contrast between what Samson was and what he is.

"O mirror of our fickle state, Since man on earth, unparalleled! The rarer thy example stands, By how much from the top of wondrous glory, Strongest of mortal men, To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen."